Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0419242406, Paperback)

Today, the projected image of a city may play a greater role than its reality in shaping the views of visitors, investors, and, even, residents. High pressure marketing and sales techniques are frequently used to help troubled cities in their transition to post-industrial centers of tourism, culture and reinvestment. Yet for all the slick professionalism, none of this is new.

Selling Places details the successive waves of how places have been sold and marketed as attractive locations for resorts, residential areas, and cultural and business centers over the past 150 years. Stephen V. Ward uses original research and richly illustrated examples of promotional ads to show that the processes of promoting places started in the American West, with airy promises of fertility and prosperity, and currently continues with the staging of major spectacles including the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Sydney in 2000.